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The legendary Chartwell Estate at 875 Nimes Road, Los Angeles, CA 90077, is a sprawling 10.39-acre residential property in the heart of Bel-Air. Blending historical architecture with Hollywood lore, this megamansion famously served as the exterior backdrop for the Clampett family home in the 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Beyond its television fame, Chartwell remains one of the most significant architectural set pieces in American residential real estate — and one whose eventual $150 million sale price tells a more interesting story than its headline-grabbing $245 million asking price ever did.
Architectural Heritage
Chartwell was designed by architect Sumner Spaulding beginning in 1930 for civil engineer and public-works contractor Lynn Atkinson — whose firm is widely reported to have taken part in construction of the Hoover Dam (known at the time as Boulder Dam) — with construction completed around 1933 (some accounts place final completion as late as 1938). Atkinson’s wife reportedly found the finished French Neoclassical château “pretentious” — and the couple never actually lived there. Atkinson instead sold the estate in the mid-1940s to Chicago hotelier Arnold Kirkeby, a bond dealer and hotel investor who had recently acquired the Beverly Wilshire Hotel; the Kirkeby family owned Chartwell for decades. It was during the Kirkeby era, not Atkinson’s, that the house achieved its Beverly Hillbillies fame — its limestone facade and iron gates were filmed for the show’s opening credits, even though almost no interior scenes were ever shot on location.
The main residence is built from symmetrical cut limestone and spans approximately 25,000 square feet. In 1986, media billionaire A. Jerrold “Jerry” Perenchio — later chairman and CEO of Univision from 1992 to 2007, and earlier a talent agent and boxing promoter who staged the 1971 Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier “Fight of the Century” — purchased the estate from the Kirkeby estate for roughly $14 million and hired the celebrated French designer Henri Samuel to extensively renovate the interiors over the following five years, reportedly retaining little beyond the original exterior walls. Samuel’s past clients had included the Rothschild family and the fashion house Valentino.
Elite Estate Features
The property offers panoramic “jetliner” views extending from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean. The grounds house a collection of luxury structures and amenities, including:
- Main Mansion: Listing materials describe 11 bedrooms and 18 bathrooms, along with a formal ballroom, a paneled dining hall, and a formal salon. (A small number of press accounts from around the 2019 sale cite larger figures — as many as 18 bedrooms and 24 bathrooms — so the exact count varies somewhat by source.)
- Guest House: A separate 5-bedroom guest residence designed by noted Southern California architect Wallace Neff.
- Recreation Facilities: A 75-foot outdoor swimming pool, a pool house, and a private tennis court.
- Collector’s Amenities: An underground car gallery holding up to 40 vehicles and a temperature-controlled 12,000-bottle wine cellar.
- The Grounds: European-influenced gardens with tall boxwood hedges forming a series of enclosed “garden within a garden” rooms, outdoor sculptures, fountains, and a pagoda-style structure at one end of the property. Perenchio also planted a private grove of transplanted redwood trees and a working vegetable garden elsewhere on the grounds.
Beyond the amenities listed above, Perenchio’s renovation is also frequently described as including significant underground engineering: an underground parking structure holding the estate’s 40-car capacity, and — according to multiple secondhand accounts, though not officially confirmed — a tunnel connecting the main house’s basement to the pool and pool house, allowing movement around the grounds without being seen from the gardens above. Combined with the walls he built to replace the estate’s original street-facing iron gates (torn down after years of tourists stopping to gawk at the Beverly Hillbillies house), these features reflect just how much of Perenchio’s renovation budget went toward privacy rather than pure decoration.
Wallace Neff, who designed Chartwell’s guest house, was one of Southern California’s most influential architects of the early-to-mid 20th century — best known for popularizing the Spanish Colonial Revival style across Los Angeles and for experimenting with early poured-concrete “Airform” dome housing. He designed homes for numerous Hollywood figures during his career, and coincidentally, another Neff-designed mansion in Beverly Hills would later become the home of Lachlan Murdoch’s brother, James Murdoch — an odd family footnote to Chartwell’s eventual sale.
A Record Sale — At Less Than Half the Ask
Chartwell has repeatedly made headlines in the elite California real estate market, though rarely for the reasons its marketing implied. Following Perenchio’s death in May 2017, the estate was first shopped privately for $350 million. It then hit the open market in October 2018 with a $245 million asking price — briefly the highest listed price for any home in the United States — before being cut to $195 million by mid-2019.
In December 2019, media executive Lachlan Murdoch, co-chairman of News Corp and eldest son of Rupert Murdoch, purchased the estate for approximately $150 million, a sale that also included a neighboring parcel Perenchio had acquired in 2016 — the former Bel-Air home of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The transaction was not brokered by a single agent but by a team of eight listing agents across three firms: Drew Fenton, Gary Gold, and Jeff Hyland of Hilton & Hyland; Joyce Rey, Jade Mills, and Alexandra Allen of Coldwell Banker Global Luxury; and Drew and Susan Gitlin of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties. Jade Mills, in particular, had a notable track record at this end of the market, having also represented the buyer in the 2016 sale of the Playboy Mansion for $100 million.
At $150 million, the sale officially broke the record for the most expensive residential transaction in California history at the time — even though it closed at less than half of Chartwell’s original $350 million pocket-listing price and well below the $245 million figure that generated most of the estate’s headlines. The gap between Chartwell’s asking prices and its final sale price is itself a useful illustration of how aggressively nine-figure Los Angeles listings are typically priced relative to what ultra-luxury buyers are actually willing to pay: at the time of the sale, Forbes noted it as only the sixth Los Angeles-area home ever to sell above $100 million, underscoring how thin the pool of qualified buyers is at this level of the market even when a property carries Chartwell’s degree of architectural and pop-culture pedigree.
Since the Murdoch purchase, Chartwell has remained a private residence rather than a public landmark, continuing the pattern Perenchio set decades earlier: a house built to be seen on television by millions, and in person by almost no one.
